On The Advanced Services That 5G May Provide To IoT Applications

The advent of the 5G network is a key enabler to the growth of IoT, with the promise to innovate and revolutionize contemporary architectures by enabling new IoT-optimized services. Far from being just a bandwidth and latency improvement, the real potential of 5G lies in the intelligent management of network resources, and in the possibility of offering new services at the network level. Developers of IoT applications will no longer be forced to adopt a cloud-centric approach, where all storage and computation is centralized, but will be able to exploit network-provided resources, adopting Edge or Fog computing approaches, with numerous advantages such as higher locality, increased computation power and reliability, reduced latency and power consumption. Network operators, on the other hand, need to offer a compelling set of services while designing the intelligent components of their 5G networks, which would drive IoT developers to prefer their network-hosted services to cloud-based ones managed by over-the-top players. This paper aims at identifying which sets of services may be offered by a 5G network, by analyzing the computing, storage, and communication services that are currently offered by 11 major IoT platform providers, as well as those that are currently not being provided due to limitations of the cloud computing paradigm.